Sunday, March 15, 2015

What's New in Visual Studio 2015

The following are the new features of the Visual Studio 2015

UI debugging tools for XAML
Two new tools — the Live Visual Tree and the Live Property Explorer — that can use to inspect the visual tree of your running WPF application, as well as the properties on any element in the tree. In short, these tools will allow to select any element in your running app and show the final, computed and rendered properties.

Single sign-in
The new release, reduces the authentication prompts required to access many integrated cloud services in Visual Studio. Now, when user authenticate to the first cloud service in Visual Studio, we will automatically sign in, or reduce the authentication prompts for other integrated cloud services.

CodeLens
With CodeLens, user can find out more about code while staying focused on work in the editor. User can now see the history of C++, SQL, or JavaScript files versioned in Git repositories by using CodeLens file-level indicators. When working with source control in Git and work items in TFS, user can also can get information about the work items associated with C++, SQL, or JavaScript files by using CodeLens file-level work items indicators.

Code Maps
When you user to understand specific dependencies in thier code, visualize them by creating Code Maps. User can then navigate these relationships by using the map, which appears next to code.

Diagnostics Tools
The Diagnostic Tools debugger window has the following improvements:
 1. Supports 64-bit Windows Store apps
 2. The timeline zooms as necessary so the most recent break event is always visible

Exception Settings
User can configure debugger exception settings by using the Exception Settings tool window. The new window is non-modal and includes improved performance, search, and filter capabilities.

JavaScript Editor
The JavaScript editor now provides you with IntelliSense suggestions when passing an object literal to functions documented using JSDoc. User can use the Task List feature to review task comments, such as // TODO, in JavaScript code.

Unit Tests
In Visual Studio 2015 preview, introduced Smart Unit Tests, which explores developer's .NET code to generate test data and a suite of unit tests. Smart Unit Tests enables support for an API that can use to guide test data generation, specify correctness properties of the code under test, and direct the exploration of the code under test.

XAML Language Service
The XAML language service has been rebuilt on top of .NET Compiler Platform so that it can provide you with a fast, reliable, and modern XAML editing experience that includes IntelliSense.

Timeline Tool
The new Timeline tool provides you with a scenario-centric view of the resources that your applications consume, which you can use to inspect, diagnose, and improve the performance of your WPF and Windows Store 8.1 applications.

What's New in .NET Framework 4.6

The following are the new features of the .NET Framework 4.6


64-bit JIT Compiler for managed code
The .NET Framework 4.6 features a new version of the 64-bit JIT compiler. This compiler provides significant performance improvements over the existing 64-bit JIT compiler.

Changes in Base Class Library
There are so many new APIs have been added to this new .NET Framework to enable key scenarios, especially for the Cross-Platform environment. The CultureInfo.CurrentCulture and CultureInfo.CurrentUICulture properties are now read-write rather than read-only. Additional collections implement ReadOnlyCollection<T> such as Queue<T> and Stack<T>. It implement System.Collections.ObjectModel.ReadOnlyCollection, including System.Collections.Generic.Queue and System.Collections.Generic.Stack.

Resizing in Windows Forms controls
The .NET Framework 4.6 expanded some namespaces that enable us to resize Windows Forms forms. This is an opt-in feature.
To enable it, set the EnableWindowsFormsHighDpiAutoResizing element to true in the application configuration (app.config) file.

Support for code page encodings
The core .NET Framework  primarily supports Unicode encodings and by default it provides limited support for code page encodings. We can add support for code page encodings that are available in the .NET Framework but unsupported in .NET Core by registering code page encodings with the Encoding.RegisterProvider method.

Open-source .NET Framework packages
Some great .NET packages such as the Immutable Collections and SIMD APIs are now available, open source, on GitHub. GitHub is a repository that contains the foundation libraries that make up the .NET Core development stack.

Improvements to event tracing
An EventSource object can now be constructed directly and you can call one of the Write() methods to emit a self-describing event.

.Net Native
It is a pre-compilation technology for building and deploying Windows Store apps. It compiles apps that are written in managed code (Like Visual C#) and that target the .NET Framework to native code. It is quite different from Just-In-Time (JIT) as well as the Native Image Generator (NGEN).